Oversized gears rise up the walls on either side of the stage at the Kalamazoo Civic Auditorium. Farther back, a catwalk spans the stage from right to left, flanked by shelves packed with faux books and what looks like a tree made out of copper pipes rising to the heavens on one side.

It’s a portion of the setting for the Civic Youth Theatre’s steampunk rendition of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” which opened Oct. 28, and the sci-fi Victorian nature of the surroundings make it the perfect setting for talking about ghosts.

Ben Zylman, director of marketing and development for the theater, stands at the lip of the stage, positioned in the same place he once had a strange encounter while talking with an out-of-town guest. He had brought the guest downstage after turning on the work lights using the switch on the back wall, a distance of maybe 50 feet away from where they were then standing, and after five minutes or so they prepared to leave.

“We were right here talking,” Zylman says. “This was all dark, just the work lights were on. And I said, I’ll walk you out, I just have to turn off the lights.” He turns, gesturing with his hands. “And they all went out.”

He hadn’t left the spot.

Thelma Mertz

Not much is known about the origins of the ghost of the Civic Auditorium — referred to by those who work there as “Thelma Mertz” — but rumors of a resident ghost predate Jim Carver, who began working at the theater as a production assistant in 1959. He later served as business director and managing director at the theater, holding the latter position from 1974 until his retirement in 1997, when he moved to Colorado.

In a series of emails, Carver related a handful of his own encounters with Thelma, who was referred to simply as “the ghost,” he said, until the young people involved in the Civic Summer Theatre program gave it a name in the 1980s. (Zylman remembers hearing the name as early as his first acting gig at the Civic in 1978, a role in “Show Boat,” and though he recalls the name being a fairly recent application at the time, “Thelma was legendary at that point,” he says.)

According to Carver, the Summer Theatre youth also crafted an origin story for the ghost, saying Thelma was “an actress that was jilted by her lover and threw herself off the balcony in despair,” and dubbing the Civic Summer Theatre awards at the time the “Thelma Mertz Awards.”

Carver claims no knowledge as to the possible true identity of the ghost that reportedly haunts the halls of the building at 329 S. Park St., which in 1931 was gifted to the then just two-year-old acting group the Kalamazoo Civic Players by W.E. Upjohn. He said that while there is no record of anyone dying at the theater — which may explain the occurrences for some — “there are too many unexplained things that have happened over the years not to believe there really is a ghost in the building.”

Late-night hauntings

Carver has had several strange experiences at the theater. His first encounter was late one night in about 1965, when he was the only one in the building and he heard the piano playing in the Green Room downstairs.

“I slowly made my way down the hallway,” he said, “and when I opened the door, the piano stopped. I turned on the lights and there was no one there.”

On another occasion, at about 3 a.m. when he was again alone in the building, he was working in the space under the stage known as the “trap room” when he heard someone walk across the stage above him. When he went up to the stage to look, there was no one there.

And on yet another late-night occasion, he was alone in the light booth above and behind the audience area, working on some light cues, when he was suddenly aware that there was someone standing right behind him. He turned around quickly, he said, but again there was no one there.

Other examples — things being moved inexplicably from where they were left the night before; a story from a former employee who was locking up for the night and heard a dressing room door close but found no one inside — have made him a believer.

Ghostly encounters

Janet Gover also believes. A major accounts and classified sales manager at the Kalamazoo Gazette, Gover has also played a role in nearly three dozen plays at the Civic in the past 30 years. In a recent interview she said she’s had a handful of strange experiences she attributes to the theater’s resident ghost.

Her first encounter was in the early 1980s when she was running sound for a Civic production of “Deathtrap” and she saw the “figure of a person” in the black and white monitor fed by a camera trained on the stage, which was empty at the time.

“It was like it was burned into the screen, in a trench coat and hat,” Gover said of the figure. “This was one of my very first shows there, and I hadn’t really heard all the ghost stories. ... But when I told people about it, it was like, oh, that’s Thelma.”

During a production of “Singin’ in the Rain” in the ’90s, Gover had another odd experience, this time in character, onstage during an actual performance. In the middle of a scene, she said, she felt like someone was pulling off her hat.

“It wasn’t a hat that would come off unless I took it off,” she said. “I really felt like somebody was just slowly pulling it straight up off my head.”

Eventually the hat did come off, and Gover was forced to improvise.

These experiences and those she’s heard from others — “there are lots of people who have had encounters with weird things that have happened,” she says — have led her to believe they’re more than just coincidence.

She thinks the ghost could be “a soul that loved the theater and wishes to spend eternity around people making the magic of theatre,” she said, laughing. “Haunting them, but not maliciously.”

Is the Civic haunted?

As is perhaps the case with many reported hauntings, whether or not you believe the Civic Auditorium is haunted may depend on whom you ask about it. A number of people who have had strange experiences — Carver and Gover among them — will tell you something’s definitely going on. Others aren’t so sure.

Prop Manager Stacy Bartell and Scenic Designer David Kyhn, working on the set as Zylman relates his own experience, are more skeptical, though Bartell says her aunt saw the ghost during a tour backstage on a Saturday, seeing a woman in a long black dress at a time when she and her companion, Bartell’s mother, should have been the only ones inside. Kyhn echoes a sentiment you’ll hear more than once when investigating the ghost of a reportedly haunted theater.

“Every theatre has one,” he says.

Zylman seems somewhere in between, saying the ghost is probably “more apocryphal than factual” and noting that when doing a run of a show it’s common to have one of those nights where everything seems to go wrong.

“For whatever reason the lights don’t work or costume pieces are missing or this or that,” he says. “Instinctively we all say, oh, Thelma’s here.”

But Zylman also acknowledges the seemingly unexplainable occurrences people have reported experiencing at the theater — hearing music throughout the building emanating from an unknown source, seeing apparitions, etc. — and sums up the question of whether the building is haunted or not with what is perhaps the best answer possible given what little we know about the science of the afterlife: “Who knows?”

‘The ghost is on our side’

Regardless of whether or not Thelma Mertz exists inside the Civic, she’s certainly taken on a life — afterlife? — of her own outside its walls, her story circulating in books and blog posts, carried on by those who’ve been touched by the Civic through the years and spread to succeeding generations. She’s a feature on the Kalamazoo Jaycees’ annual Ghosts of Kalamazoo Historic Tour and even has her own Facebook profile, which at the time of this writing boasts a list of friends 57 strong. (Messages sent to her profile page went unanswered.)

And while the ghost may be a bit of a prankster at times, moving props around or fussing with the lights on occasion, she or he or it seems affable enough.

“I don’t think that it’s anything that any of us are fearful of or uncomfortable with,” Zylman says.